Six piece outfit of musical chameleons Architecture in Helsinki, formedin Melbourne but now scattered across the globe, hit the ground running with theirthird album, Places Like This. Fizzing with electrical currents, channeling calypso rhythms andtropicalia flavors with lashings of percussion a-go-go, the new songs pack akaleidoscopic punch that is little short of breathtaking. Pop effervescence hasn’t sounded thisfresh in ages.

As the now-New York based songwriter/vocalist Cameron Bird explains, “We’ve alwaysstrived to go somewhere we haven’t gone before, not to be complacent with where we’vebeen. This time, the energy, the sounds, and the way it was conceived – it’s taking what wehad before and turning it up louder. The colors are brighter, everything is more flamboyant.In Case We Die was all self-engineered, and James Cecil and I produced it over five months,we spent every single day on it in this room with no windows, a glorified garage. So theexperience was very insular and intense, a cabin fever affair,” Bird notes. ‘So, this timearound we really wanted to make the whole experience super Intense AND fun.’

In Case We Die saw the band become a truly international affair with a hugely successfulindependent agenda - the band toured heavily from North America to Iceland, Europe toMexico, with the likes of David Byrne popping backstage at the NYC shows to pay his respects,spending most of 2005 and a good portion of 2006 on the road. AIH were attractingthe attention of highly influential media from Pitchfork to Uncut, growing a loyalfan base with high profile international support tours alongside the likes of Clap Your HandsSay Yeah and much talked about spots at festivals from Sasquatch in NW USA to the DanubeFestival in Austria and Homebake in Australia.

By mid-2006, Bird had upped stakes from inner city Melbourne and landed in Brooklynwhilst his band mates kept the home fire burning in Melbourne. When it came time to workon the new album, everything was different. Especially for Bird.

“Compare my reality in Melbourne to the reality of living in New York? Well you can’t really.It’s like living on two different planets. I grew up on a farm in New South Wales, 30km fromthe nearest town!” he laughs. “It could not be further removed from where I am right now,and the place where our music originated. I began working on songs for Places Like This ina shoe box apartment in South Williamsburg,” Bird explains. “Being here in the summer,endless 40 degree days and insane humidity, coupled with the fact that I was living above aLaundromat… It was like living in a furnace!”

The largely Puerto Rican neighborhood could not help but seep into Bird’s songwriting. “Thesense of community in the way the Puerto Rican and Dominican folks inhabit their ‘hood,people are always in the street playing dominoes and turning on fire hydrants, there isalways a car out front in the street with reggaeton bangin’ at all hours, 9am to 3am. Theeffect on your psyche is undeniable,” he enthuses. “I had this glorified roof deck where mystudio was, and every day I’d have to go out there and clean off all the shit that had beenthrown from of the windows of my neighbors – roast chickens, steak bones, condoms, stinkingtrash… it was intense and inspiring. I had never really been in a mindset like it, where Iwas being so directly influenced by my environment, rather than jangling around in my ownhead. It was much more fluid.”

Fluid, too, was the process of demoing the new songs and working out the parts with hisfaraway band mates. “I would send parts back and forth to Melbourne, it got to the pointwhere we were jamming on Instant Messenger!” Bird says, half incredulous. “I’d send ademo and James would jam drumbeats back to me over IM and we’d work though whichbeats to play. Then all 6 of us were all throwing in ideas and random arrangements and wehad this wild cyber chemistry going on!’ The tyranny of distance ended up being the mostcreatively invigorating experience the band had ever gone through.”

So keen were the band to fulfill their collective dream of guest-programming rage that two almost completely separate programs have been put together for the Saturday AM version and the Saturday night – get up in time, have a nap in the arvo, and then stay up late for as much of their picks as you can handle.

23:16pm

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